2014 Founders’ Letter

When Larry and I founded Google in 1998, many
elements came together to make our work possible.
Like other companies at the time, we benefited from
the increasing power and low cost of computation
and from the unprecedented shift of information to
the Internet. We shared a profound belief in the
power of technology to make life better for people
everywhere and imagined what life could be like 10,
15, 20 years down the road. Nevertheless, now that
we are here, I am amazed at the progress and
opportunities. For example, I could not have
imagined we would be making a computer that fits in
a contact lens, with the potential to make life
better for millions of people with diabetes.

Yet, this is something we are working on today. Our
glucose-sensing contact lens is being developed in
partnership with Novartis. A tiny chip, using power
measured in nanowatts, is embedded into the lens in
order to monitor glucose levels continuously. This
technology, and others like it being developed
today, was made possible through continued
improvements in electronics and the
ever-accelerating pace of technological progress.
As computers get smaller, cheaper, and more
powerful, their potential gets larger and the world
is transformed.

Larry and I were lucky to participate in one such
period of transformation nearly two decades ago:
search engines made a leap from modest-sized ones
that would search over limited, separate corpuses,
to those we know today that attempt to search all
the world’s knowledge. Just as advancements in
miniaturization and power consumption have made the
contact lens possible, it was similar progress in
computing power and cost that allowed us to create
comprehensive search, and make it accessible to
anyone with an internet connection. It was the
right time for search to become a universally
available tool for bringing all the world’s
information to your home, to your school, to your
pocket.

These advances also made it possible to provide
enterprise class email, featuring vast storage and
search capabilities, to anyone in the world - for
free; that’s why we created Gmail. And, if you
fast-forward to today, we recently harnessed
continued improvements in storage cost and machine
learning to create Google Photos, which lets
everyone in the world safely keep, and search
through, a lifetime of photos and videos.

The increasing power of computation extends well
beyond the Internet. One example close to my heart
is our self-driving car project. The goal is to
make cars capable of driving themselves entirely
without human intervention. We hope to make
roadways far safer and transportation far more
affordable and accessible to those who can’t drive.

To do this, we can now rely on immense processing
power and advanced sensors that would not have been
possible only a few years ago. And while it will
still take time before we see self-driving cars
everywhere on our streets, over a million auto
fatalities per year worldwide make this a risk
worth taking. As I write, our cars have just
crossed 1 million miles of autonomous driving, and
our fully self-driving vehicle prototype is about
to begin testing in our hometown.

This project and others like it are very
challenging, and the outcomes are far from certain.
But, just like when we started nearly two decades
ago, it is possible to create the technology that
allows people to lead healthier, happier lives.
And, along with our incredibly passionate
employees, I am humbled and excited to try.